And all of them, in one way or another, fail. Collapse. Give way to the violence they’re meant to hold at bay, whether it’s the niceties of polite lunch conversation or the ways Cassian can’t stick with all that “weather report” bullshit once he realizes his family has actually been in trouble while he’s been off playing with the Lost Jackasses for the last two days. Rituals are nice, precious, sometimes beautiful. They can’t stop a blaster bolt.
Let’s dispense, first, with the least consequential (if also, deep down, my favorite) of our various failed rituals today: the foreshadowed arrival of Eedy Karn, mother of Syril, for a pleasant afternoon lunch. Kathryn Hunter’s performance as Eedy was already a comedic high point of Andor‘s first season, simultaneously providing laughs and a quick primer for, well, Why He’s Like That. Andor possesses a flexibility of tone that a lot of Star Wars projects can’t handle, and watching how effortlessly the show slides from spy drama to outright farce is one of the highlights of this episode, all arch looks and anxious smiles and cheerfully pulverized cakes. (Kyle Soller’s boneless body language when Syril collapses on his bed, after being exposed to his mother’s latest withering assault, is the stuff that memes are made of.) Predictably, Eedy’s passive-aggressive hostility ends up vaporized by the unstoppable force that is Dedra Meero, as she calmly, dispassionately puts aside all the civil niceties and makes it clear who’s now officially in charge of Syril’s care and feeding. (“I have a different plan in mind,” she pleasantly reveals after Eedy suggests she’ll toughen Syril up, before telling her future mother-in-law she can guarantee her a “level of engagement” with her son “inversely proportional to the volume of anxiety you generate in our lives.”) It’s fucked-up, controlling, a little scary, funny as hell, and also, somehow, deeply sweet. It’s smart of series creator Tony Gilroy and director Ariel Kleiman to sequester this stuff in the first half of the episode, before the blaster bolts start flying. (It might get a little more difficult to swallow The Great Fascist Love Story once the bodies start to fall.) But god, what a funny, odd little short story to exist as texture inside this much grander tale.
Which is, blessedly, mostly playing out in just two locations for this miniature finale to Andor‘s first block of second-season episodes. (That level of focus is one of a couple of ways this is a better episode of TV than the previous one.) Chandrila is all pleasant smiles and icy silences, as Leida enthusiastically (if spitefully) marries herself into the family of a man her mother quietly loathes and banker Tay Kolma makes increasingly strident (if unwitting) demands for his own assassination at the Rebellion’s hands. Mon Mothma can’t prevent any of it, penned in by past compromises and her own unwillingness to get down in the dirt for the real fight. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” she lies to Luthen when he makes it clear to her that the threat Tay represents is now an existential one and will be treated accordingly. “How nice for you” is the bitter reply, coming deep from the sunless space from which he’s forced to wage his war, while she dances frantically in the sun.
Things are clearer on Mina-Rau—and worse. You can blame a hundred little factors for how it all goes down here: Wilmon’s inconvenient teenage romance, the rapist Imperial lieutenant hoping to mix business and ugly pleasure, sheer dumb bad luck. But from the moment dinner is interrupted by the news that the Imperial audit team is on its way, rounding up undocumented workers and looking for trouble, the writing for Brasso’s team is on the wall. The back half of the episode, then, becomes a deadly piece of clockwork, as Kleiman uses the rhythms of Mon’s increasingly frantic, increasingly blitzed wedding dance to keep time slipping as the situation on the farming planet turns to shit. There’s still time for grace notes—a fond farewell to poor, busted B2EMO or the way Brasso protects his farmer buddy by putting on a show of enraged betrayal for the benefit of Imperial eyes. But just as Vel’s old lover Cinta appears like a smartly dressed angel of death to chauffeur Tay off to hell on Chandrila, death is clearly coming for someone on Mina-Rau, no matter how hard Cassian Andor tries to push his ill-fitting action-hero limits to stop it.
Thus do the heroes of the Rebellion die, with a lucky shot from a Stormtrooper with seconds left to live, a moment of implication, a hint of faltering faith. They die because they have to—and if any “hero” ever had to die to keep the resistance safe, Tay Kolma made a damn strong case for his own immediate dispensability. And they die because they could die, the terminal result of a math equation featuring X amount of blaster fire sent in Y direction for Z amount of time. Brasso isn’t the first person to die in Cassian Andor’s arms in the name of his revolution; we already know, years down the line, that he won’t be the last. But the dance has started in earnest, now: The chaos, controlled and otherwise, has begun to spin. Year two of Andor is over now. No one’s getting out of this thing alive.
Stray observations
- • Farmer Guy asks Brasso to tell Cassian to tell Axis what’s “going on” on Mina-Rau, because he doesn’t understand the truth. “It’s going on everywhere.”
- • Mon makes the classic parent screw-up of giving the speech she’d want to hear, not the one Leida needs, when she tries to talk her out of getting married. “It will be remembered as an act of great bravery,” she tells her, using very pretty language to completely miss the point.
- • I don’t envy people whose job it is to make up fake wedding ceremonies and the like for shows like this; the Chandrilan one looks convincing enough (more so than the big fancy statue that’s Sculdun’s ostentatious wedding gift, at least).
- • Denise Gough and Kyle Soller make for such a good doubles comedy act; Dedra practicing her smile in the mirror is a thing of queasy beauty.
- • There is gorgeous costuming in this episode. Vel doesn’t get a ton to do here besides look anguished at the inescapability of violence and suddenly appearing murder-exes, but she looks great doing it.
- • “You look nothing like what I expected!” It’sso fun to watch Eedy try, and fail, to pierce Dedra’s armor.
- • We get a few little tidbits of Dedra’s backstory: Her parents were criminals, and she was raised in an “Imperial kinderblock.” Sounds nice!
- • It’s rare to see Cassian afford himself the luxury of being pissed off and panicked when he calls in to Luthen’s shop.
- • Once Brasso hops on his speeder, and the floating DJ/disco ball droid hits the dance floor, the pace of this thing suddenly picks up in a palpable way. I like both halves, but it’s nice to see Andor kicking into gear.
- • Some excellent Luthen-isms as he puts the writing on the wall for Mon: “People fail. That’s our curse.” And then: “You know the number.”
- • My knowledge isn’t encyclopedic enough to say definitively, but this is certainly one of the first times I’ve ever personally seen a Star Wars project acknowledge the existence of rape. (To absolutely zero sympathy from either the lieutenant or his driver, natch—good riddance to both.)
- • That final montage hits hard, with the shots of Brasso’s corpse, Cassian’s anguish, and Mon’s frenetic twirling all building to that sudden, abrupt cut to silence and black. Next week can’t get here soon enough.
